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Posts Tagged ‘Socinians’

The following is a satirical catechism put together by John Owen, highlighting the consequences of Socinian error.

Question 1: What is God?Answer: God is a spirit, that hath a bodily shape, eyes, ears, hands, feet, like to us.

Question 2: Where is this God?Answer: In a certain place in heaven, upon a throne, where a man may see from his right hand to his left.

Question 3: Doth he ever move out of that place?Answer: I cannot tell what he doth ordinarily, but he hath formerly come down sometimes upon the earth.

Question 4: What doth he do in there in that place?Answer: Among other things, he conjectures at what men will do here below.

Question 5: Doth he, then, not know what we do?Answer: He doth know what we have done, but not what we will do.

Question 6: What frame is he upon his knowledge and conjecture?Answer: Sometimes he is afraid, sometimes grieved, sometimes joyful, and sometimes troubled.

Question 7: What peace and comfort can I have in committing myself to his providence, if he knows not what will befall me tomorrow?Answer: What is that to me? See you to that.

Wow! Owen wasn’t pulling any punches. How we think about God goes a long way in how we think about life and reality and whether we can find comfort in God’s providence. Carl Trueman observes:

[T]he issues at stake when it came to the doctrine of God had profound pastoral implications; and the Arminian and Socinian proposals were not simply intellectually disastrous; they were also disastrous for the economy of salvation, and thus for Christian pastoral practice, and for the experience and aspirations of the ordinary believer as well. – John Owen: Reformed Catholic, Renaissance Man, 66.

Doing theology isn’t merely an exercise in mental gymnastics. No, it’s immensely practical. In fact, it’s the only way we can explain and cope with reality in this beautiful, yet sad, world.

Today one might often hear folks holding to the “authority of scripture” or Sola Scriptura (scripture alone) as proof of their Reformed (or more broadly, Christian) orthodoxy. The concept of biblical authority is considered that “safe all” category sufficient to always guide one home to truth. As long as we maintain Sola Scriptura, (it is assumed) we’ll be good. And we’ll always be reforming the church (semper reformanda).

But this is a dangerous misunderstanding, both of the Reformed distinctive (Sola Scriptura), as well as the nature of theology itself. And we see this mistake played out in history.

Carl Trueman observes how in John Owen’s day, “the Socinians appear to hold to a basic scripture principle in a formally similar manner to the orthodox.” That is, they held to a form of Sola Scritpura: Scripture alone was the sole and final authority in determining truth. For some odd reason, however, the Socinians couldn’t seem to find the doctrine of the Holy Trinity anywhere in Scripture!

What Owen labored to demonstrate, therefore, was that sola scriptura was not enough. It was not merely scripture’s authority that was all-important, but also its interpretation.

Trueman explains the difference between the two approaches:

The differences, in fact, are significant, and go straight to the heart of why Owen can see scripture as teaching the doctrine of the Trinity and the Socinians reject such a conclusion: the point at issue is not simply whether scripture is the authoritative noetic foundation for theology, but how that scripture is to be interpreted, a point which draws in matters of logic, of metaphysics, and of how individual passages of scripture are mutually related to the act of interpretation…

The radical biblicism of the Socinians was, in effect, cutting the very ground away from under the traditional doctrine and forcing its exponents to greater degrees of precisely the kind of conceptual and linguistic subtlety which the Socinians decried as betraying the straightforward teaching of scripture. – John Owen: Reformed Catholic, Renaissance Man, 48-49.

Notice the irony. And yet this is very helpful for us today since we often hear people arguing for a form of “biblicism” which lays claim to the Sola Scriptura principle, all-the-while ignoring the larger philosophical challenges inherent to scripture’s interpretation.